How do I add a subscribed calendar to my Family Hub?

If your child's team, school, or league gives you a calendar you subscribe to by link, the kind that updates itself when a game gets moved, you can absolutely get it onto your Family Hub! It just takes one extra step.

Family Hub connects to Google, Outlook, and iCloud accounts and syncs the calendars that live inside them. It doesn't accept a subscription link on its own. So the trick is to add your link to your Google or Outlook account first, then sync that account to your Hub. Once it's there, it behaves like any other calendar on your Hub, updates included.

Why connecting iCloud won't bring these calendars over

If you subscribed to these calendars on your iPhone or iPad, connecting iCloud to your Hub won't bring them over. Apple stores subscribed calendars outside your iCloud calendar account rather than inside it, so they don't even appear on iCloud.com. That means there's nothing for your Hub to find when it connects.

This isn't something we can change on our end, but the steps below will get your calendars onto your Hub either way.

What if my family only uses iCloud?

Google and Outlook are the two accounts that accept a subscription link, so you'll need one of them to hold your subscribed calendars. If you don't have either, a free Google account does the job, and you can use it just for this.

Once it's set up, add your subscription links to that account using the steps below, then connect it to your Hub. Your Hub can sync more than one calendar account at a time, so your everyday iCloud calendar keeps working exactly as it does now and your sports schedules simply arrive alongside it!

Add the link to your Google Calendar

You'll want to do this part on a computer. The Google Calendar mobile app can't add a calendar by link, so a browser is the only way.

Before you start: have your subscription link ready on the computer you're using. The quickest place to find it is wherever it came from, usually a "subscribe" or "add to calendar" link on your team or school's website, or the email it arrived in. If the link is saved on your phone, it may be easiest to email it to yourself and open that email on your computer. Just keep in mind that if you subscribed on your phone, it may not be able to show you the original link, so going back to the source is your best bet!

1. Open Google Calendar in your web browser and sign in to the same Google account you've connected to your Family Hub
2. On the left side, find "Other calendars" and click the "+" next to it
3. Choose "From URL"
4. Paste in your subscription link, then click "Add calendar"
5. Repeat for each calendar you'd like to add, whether that's one child's soccer schedule, another's band calendar, or the school district calendar

Good to know: Google can take up to 24 hours to pull in events from a brand new subscription. If your calendar shows up empty at first, that's normal. Give it some time before troubleshooting.

Bring them onto your Family Hub

Since your Google account is already connected to your Hub, there's nothing to reconnect. Your Hub just needs to pick up the new calendars.

1. On your Family Hub, tap the Calendar page
2. Tap the settings gear
3. Tap the round arrow icon to manually trigger a sync

Your new calendars will appear in your calendar list, ready to go. From there you can give each one its own color and choose which family members it belongs to, just like any other calendar!

A couple of things to expect: subscribed calendars are read-only, so you'll see the events on your Hub but you can't edit them there. Changes come from whoever publishes the calendar. And because updates travel from the publisher to Google to your Hub, a rescheduled game may take a little while to make its way over. Give it some time and your Hub will catch up on its own.

Using Outlook instead?

Outlook supports subscription links too, so the same approach works. Add your link to your Outlook account on the web, then sync that account to your Hub using the steps above.

Still not seeing your calendar?

Give it up to 24 hours first. Google and Outlook both pull in new subscriptions on their own schedule, and a brand new calendar can take that long to fill in. Your Hub syncs whatever your calendar account already has, so the events need to land there before they can make it over.

After that, try the sync steps above once more. If it's still missing, visit How do I fix Wi-Fi and sync issues on my Family Hub? or reach out and we'll take a look with you!